


Catocala ilia

by starcunning



Series: Erebidae [5]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Aetherial Manipulation (not the BLM ability), Aetherology, Blood Kink, F/M, He gets better, Psychic Bond, Soul Bond, don't worry too much about the character death, featuring my cool headcanon that Sharlayan was Elidibus's project, technically kallie's not the MAIN wol but u kno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2020-08-23 06:14:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20238076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starcunning/pseuds/starcunning
Summary: “So you do feel something.”“From highest heaven to blackest hell,” he purred, reaching out to tip her chin toward him with one clawtip. “There are more immediate things.”“Like what?”“The charge of your aether the moment you cry out for me,” he said, lifting his hand. She tipped her head back and he leaned down, his teeth inches from her neck. “Can you not feel me, Kallisti?”Her lips parted in the beginnings of a protest—even the rush of his breath against her skin was absent, when he did not speak—but then she felt the faintest prickling, like the moment before a lightning strike, creeping down her spine from the site of her brand. She felt the old ache of bruises long since faded. “Oh,” she said.He hummed out a satisfied sound, and she felt his smile against her throat a moment later, teeth sharp against her skin. “Would you like to know what I recognize as intimacy?” he asked.





	Catocala ilia

**Author's Note:**

> Further [imports from tumblr.](https://starcunning.tumblr.com/post/181306978744/catocala-ilia)
> 
> _Catocala ilia_ is also known as the beloved underwing or the wife underwing.

It felt strange to walk the streets of Sharlayan, knowing the buildings around her were empty. She could see the glow from the distant Cenotaph, though the thick fog obscured the nautilus shell blazon she was certain was there.

Kallisti had become attuned to the slight pressure change that preceded teleportation—the aether rippled over her like waves in a bathtub she’d just dropped a toy into—and so she was already looking expectantly over her shoulder when Nabriales materialized.

“What are you doing here?” the Ascian asked, casting his gaze about with disdain.  
“Treasure hunting?” Kallisti replied.  
“Your opportunism comes two decades too late,” he pointed out.  
She laughed, tipping back the brim of her hat so that it no longer impeded her view. “You may be right,” she admitted. “Perhaps I am simply overfond of owls?”  
He drew abreast of her, and she could see the way he scowled beneath his crimson mask. “I should hope not,” he said, and all at once she remembered his counterpart—the one with white robes and a decidedly avian mask. There was a flare of warmth at the nape of her neck. “Kallisti,” he said, making of her name a warning.  
She turned her head to regard him, the shadows of his hood falling deeply over his face. “Why are you interested to know, anyway?” she wondered. “It’s not as though we talk about work.”  
“Ah,” he said, “so you are here on the business of the Scions.”  
Her tail twitched in annoyance. “I never said that.”

He laughed, reaching up to take his hood down. As his hand passed over his brow, his mask seemed to melt away, so that he looked at her bare-faced, his earrings glittering in the dim light of the evening. “There, is that better?”  
Kallie could not shake the vague sense that she was being condescended to. Still … “Yes,” she admitted. “What are _you_ doing here?”  
“I was looking for you,” Nabriales said simply. She could not hear his footsteps on the stones, though he remained beside her as she walked.  
“What for?” she wondered. “The usual, I expect.”  
“You sound bored,” Nabriales said, and if she sounded bored he sounded put out.  
“I wouldn’t say that, exactly.”  
He reached out and caught her by the wrist, leading her from the path and out across the grass. They approached the edge of a bluff. She could see the Great Gubal Library far below. In the night she could hear no sound but her own breathing and the distant rustling of wind in trees.

Kallisti looked at the Paragon, the diffuse light of the moon falling upon the planes of his face. The shadows were softer here, in the dimness; he was somehow less severe. She tilted her head in curiosity, and he leaned down to kiss her.  
It was her turn to grasp him by the throat. His crystal burned against her hand; she could feel the blood begun to run down over her palm and the side of her forearm. “Wait,” she said. He straightened, taking her hand in both of his, kissing at the wound that had opened upon the crux of her palm. Kallisti shivered, his tongue laving over her skin.  
“What is it?” he asked, the words muffled by her own flesh. He turned her wrist, nuzzling against her skin to peel back her sleeve, his kisses following that trail of blood. She could feel need awaken in her already, but struggled to master it, to look upon his face until he met her gaze.  
When he did, she asked, “What do you get out of all this?”  
He laughed, his teeth grazing the pulse point on the inside of her wrist. “I had thought that was obvious.”  
“It should be, shouldn’t it?” she wondered. “And if I had ever made you come, even once, it would be, but that isn’t the case.”  
“Oh, that,” he laughed, splaying her fingers before him so that he could kiss her palm again, lips smeared with her pooling blood.  
“‘Oh, that,’” she echoed, in a not-terribly-convincing mimic. “That isn’t the sort of attitude I’m used to, I should mention. Especially from a man.”  
“Perhaps it would be illuminating for you to consider that I am not a man,” Nabriales said.  
Kallisti snorted. “I hope you can understand this comes as quite the surprise to me.”

Nabriales smirked at her, releasing her hand to tip her chin upward with the tip of one claw. “But I’m not,” he insisted. “You mortals—even the most gifted among you—can be so short-sighted.”  
“What are you, then?” Kallisti asked.  
Nabriales looked away, down the cliffs toward the vast library that overlooked the river winding through the hinterlands. “You _might_ find an answer during whatever search your Archons sent you on,” he told her, “but I suspect the scholars of Sharlayan are loathe to share that particular knowledge.” His smile was smug, assured; frustrating.  
“Ah,” Kallisti said, feeling her own smirk rise, “this is the instruction that Elidibus offered?”  
Nabriales bridled, turning his face away again. “Hardly,” he said. “He is not so quick to impart that knowledge either.” He reached out to curl his gauntlet about the nape of her neck, his palm resting against the brand seared into her skin. “What do you know about aether?” the Paragon asked.  
“There are six elements,” Kallisti began, “and two polarities. My particular spellcraft relies on my personal reserve of aether—”  
He tutted, interrupting her. “You do not _have_ aether,” he told her. “You _are_ aether.”  
“What? I mean, all living things have a reserve of aether that grants them the spark of life, but …”  
“The flesh is the flesh,” Nabriales said, “but it is not your material being that comprises you.”  
Kallisti closed her crimson eyes, shaking her head. “This is entirely too metaphysical for me,” she grumbled. “You’re real. I can touch you.”  
“And you can kill me,” Nabriales said, “but not in any way that matters. You could push me off of this cliff, and a moment later I would stand beside you, whole and unharmed.”  
“Really,” Kallisti said. She put her hand on his back and shoved.

He stumbled forward a few steps, seeming to hang in midair for just a moment as though it took all reality that long to realize there was only air beneath his feet. Nabriales laughed as he fell, hitting the ground far below. The heavy sound of impact was only barely audible to her ears. There was the briefest moment of consternation, the realization of what she’d done beginning to set in. Oh, she had killed before; it was part and parcel with her service to the Scions, really, but this had not been in battle. The stillness of the air around her became oppressive.

A hand came down on her shoulder, and she yelped in surprise, whirling to find Nabriales standing there, laughing. She looked upon his masked face, and then turned to peer over the edge of the cliff. The dark shape of his robes still laid in a crumpled heap at the foot of the cliff, though it seemed to dissipate even as she looked on, like a primal forced to relinquish its corporeality.  
“I _can_ float, you know,” is all he said.  
“So you just wanted to prove the point?” Her annoyance seeped into her tone. She lifted a hand to swat his shoulder, but he caught her wrist. He dropped it a moment later, placing the palm of his gloved hand against the nape of her neck. All was as it was but a few moments before, as though he had never died.

Or … nearly. She frowned at the sight of his mask, but said nothing. “So you really can’t die.”  
“No. You would have to be a great deal more creative.”  
“Then … Lahabrea—?”  
“Oh, yes. We have not been spared his boon presence by your compatriot’s actions, though they were—I think—less than even he is saying.” Nabriales lifted his hand from Kallisti’s neck, bringing the tip of one claw to the tuft of her ear, tracing soft fur with unyielding steel. She shivered, taking a step back from the cliff’s edge.  
“How unfair,” she said a moment later, “that this sort of treatment does not move you.”  
He chuckled, stepping after her. His shadow should have fallen across her, but he cast none and it did not. “I am not entirely divorced from sensation,” he noted. “I’ve occupied a physical form long enough, little fool. Lest you think me deaf to the way you whimper my name or numb to the way you shudder against me, let me assure you that your cries do reach me down here in the depths.”  
“So you do feel something.”  
“From highest heaven to blackest hell,” he purred, reaching out to tip her chin toward him with one clawtip. “There are more immediate things.”  
“Like what?”  
“The charge of your aether the moment you cry out for me,” he said, lifting his hand. She tipped her head back and he leaned down, his teeth inches from her neck. “Can you not feel me, Kallisti?”  
Her lips parted in the beginnings of a protest—even the rush of his breath against her skin was absent, when he did not speak—but then she felt the faintest prickling, like the moment before a lightning strike, creeping down her spine from the site of her brand. She felt the old ache of bruises long since faded. “Oh,” she said.  
He hummed out a satisfied sound, and she felt his smile against her throat a moment later, teeth sharp against her skin. “Would you like to know what I recognize as intimacy?” he asked.  
“Mmmh,” she whimpered.

He led her away from the cliff. She could smell rain on the night air, letting the coolness fill her lungs. Nabriales settled upon the grass, and she sat opposite, folding her legs before her.  
“When the Echo claims you,” Nabriales said, “you do not lose all sense of yourself, do you? There is some kernel of your being that allows you to return to yourself.”  
“There must be,” she agreed.  
“Try to focus on that feeling,” Nabriales said.  
She did, feeling the grass beneath her fingertips, the coolness of the earth below. Her heart still fluttered, not quite bereft of the adrenaline that had earlier flooded her system.

He did not touch her—not in the way she had been touched all her life, nor the way she was accustomed to. Instead he seemed, gradually, to lose the boundaries of the form that had constrained him, something blacker still than the night seeping from him to flow over her. It did not move quite like water, nor ripple like flame or wind, but seemed to dissolve the bounds of her self, surging through her like the burst of energy she felt after downing an elixir. But rather than dissipate after a moment, it lingered. Nabriales said nothing—she was not sure he could even speak in such a state; it seemed beyond her in the moment, too.

But she could feel him—his needs, his concerns, his desires—as though they were her own. She could sense without words his delight. This was a thing not unheard of among Ascians; she knew this because Nabriales knew it; but it was a pleasure long denied him. The whispers of his soul were like breath against her ear. He poured into her like the morning mist rolling over the salt marshes, dimming the wan light of the sun. She could feel the immediacy of him, the darkness that comprised him. It did not blind her; she was still aware, distantly, of the Dravanian peaks around her, of his silent face. They simply did not matter when faced with something so immediate. She should let go now, she knew; she should drift with the currents, but when they ebbed she sat alone once more upon the shores of sensation.

“Now you,” he said.  
“Now I what?” Kallisti asked, dumbstruck as a child.  
He scoffed, annoyed, turning his masked face from her once more. “Does She teach Her servants nothing?” he groused. “I can tear your defenses down myself, but don’t you think I have enough to do?”  
Kallisti shivered in the coldness of the night. It was a different darkness than the one which dwelt in him, she realized, and wondered how she had thought all darkness was the same. Had she not learned better in the instant that Elidibus touched her, cold as distant stars?  
“Do not think of him now,” Nabriales growled.  
“How—” Kallisti began, and then she remembered the brand which tethered her to him. Or perhaps it linked him to her. She could feel him, there, her soul stained with his. It had been so the moment he wrote himself into her—flesh and aether both. How had she failed to notice? “Ah.”  
“As before, then,” he said. “Be ready to let go, this time.”

She could not help but gasp as he entered her again—far more intimately than in their earlier explorations. None she had ever experienced the Echo with had mentioned any sensation whatsoever; she wondered what made this so different. She could feel him now, not stifling, not overwhelming, simply covering and filling, the boundary of her soul like a screen that allowed the wind through. She tried to remember the rushing sensation of the Echo’s visions, tried to focus on him—no longer a man, as he had said, but darkness that seemed almost to breathe and swell, like sails upon the wind, like smoke rising to fill the air.

Kallisti pushed back against him—not to repel him, but to enter him too, drawn in like flames down a hallway when one opens the door, like lightning seeking route to the ground, like ice spreading over the surface of a pond, knowing, somehow, to meet in the middle. She felt his pleasure as her own, his pride—their pride. Their fierce protectiveness over this unexpected bond, the unexpected relief in their joining.

Their name was Kallisti; it was Nabriales. They were born to the Source and to the Twelfth Reflection. They remembered a childhood spent in the salt-marshes, hunting to survive. They remembered a little village on the coast of the sea, where the sun was bright enough to see the line between water and sky upon the horizon. They remembered the smell of the peat and the salt of the surf. They remembered the bog body Kallisti found, and the crystal and the knowledge it held. They remembered the day Nabriales left to make his fortune, marked out as an unfortunate by the whispers he heard. He had not always been this. He had been a man once, chosen by a god he did not understand—and, bereft that understanding, he had taken the knowledge that came from other hands.

He was the youngest among immortals, and ever would be. He was the oldest and only survivor of his home star, rejoined to the Source long ago. He had been alone; they were not alone now.

And then they were, Kallisti gasping a lungful of cool air. He turned his face away from her.  
“That was not meant for you to see,” he said. She could hear him breathing—a notable rarity; even in their most heated moments he had always maintained a cool detachment. To hear his ragged breaths spill from his parted lips was an unexpected delight.  
“Nabriales,” she murmured.  
“It was so long ago. It happened to someone else.”  
The bitterness of his tone made her recoil, but then she gathered herself, lifting a hand to his cheek, the tip of her finger tracing the lip of his mask. “No it didn’t,” she said softly. “That was you.” She felt drained, the exhaustion sinking into her down to the very marrow. Or to the core of her soul, she supposed, if the flesh were meaningless. Little surprise he had not wished her to stand while they tried this. Kallisti felt her eyes close, heavy as stones. She wavered, and in an instant he no longer sat opposite her, but behind her, so that she could lean back against his chest. The brim of her hat was too broad, and it tumbled forward, into her lap. She did not move to retrieve it.

She could feel the ebb and flow of his aether against her own. Distantly, she was aware of the feeling of warm leather against her cheek, but it seemed almost a secondary concern. Having been awakened to the totality of his being, it was difficult now to feel only the bounds of his chosen vessel.  
“How did you do that?” she wondered, struggling to open her eyes and fix her gaze upon the stars.  
“I did no more than you do each time you transcend the boundaries of the soul to see into the past, or the whispers of another’s soul,” Nabriales said.  
“That was the Echo?” she mused. “That makes sense. But I’ve never …”  
“Perhaps that is because you have never used it against someone your equal before,” he pointed out.  
Equals. The thought surprised her, but she said nothing, only laid against him. He had no heartbeat to hear.  
“What do you know of the Ardor?” he asked.  
“You mean the Calamities?” she replied, trying to stifle a yawn. “I’ve only seen the one, of course. You … you’ve seen …”  
“Several.”  
“Several,” she echoed.  
“But not all from here,” Nabriales said. “There is a purpose to them.”  
“The Rejoining,” she said. His words—or thoughts; or memories. Not hers to know. “What is it?”  
“Think of it as … the reunification of all living things.”  
“Like what we just did?”  
“Mm,” he agreed.

“Why don’t I know these things?” Kallisti murmured.  
“Your Goddess stands in opposition to this goal,” Nabriales said. “You cannot honestly think She would tell you.”  
“Then why didn’t—”  
“Don’t spoil this by mentioning Lahabrea,” he grumbled. “Elidibus feels that you are not ready to know, but Elidibus is a hidebound bore.”  
She had to laugh at that, but it burbled from her weakly, like a spring that had dried to a trickle in a drought. She took another breath, and felt nothing of the night air’s chill, only the warmth of the Ascian she laid against, shrouding her as though a dozen blankets.

“What knowledge did you come here in search of?” Nabriales asked.  
She reached for him, taking hold of his wrist to curl his arm around her. She could feel the weight of it, welcome enough, but secondary to the way it enfolded her in the seething energy that comprised him. “I suppose it’s only fair I tell you,” she said, eyes closing. “I’m only in the colony as a stopover. I was headed to Sharlayan proper to see what news about the Isle of Val.”  
“Oh, that,” he said.  
“Mm?”  
“It is not lost, merely displaced. You may expect to find it near Hingashi.”  
“That sounds ridiculous.” She smothered a yawn.  
“Nevertheless,” said Nabriales, “I am the authority on the subject and I am telling you.”  
“Alright,” she said, suddenly much too tired to do anything but accept a seeming impossibility. “I need to rest,” Kallisti told him. “I am still mortal.”  
“For now,” he said, but before she could ask after the thought, he said, “I will depart, if that is your preference.”  
She considered it a moment, and reached a conclusion. “No,” she told him, letting her head fall back against his silent breast. “This is fine.”

When she woke she would have to examine the ramifications of that thought, but her efforts had exhausted her. The Ascian would stay until dawn, she knew. For some reason, that too was welcome. Warmth and darkness enshrouded her as she slipped into unconsciousness, and her last thought was of the sun, brilliant upon an alien sea.


End file.
